Markup languages have been developed for describing parameters used in support of operations, and the operations themselves, using an abstract grammar that is independent of any particular programming language or environment in which the operations may be performed. These descriptions have been found to be useful in a number of situations. For example, a description of computer functionality in a language-neutral and environment-neutral format is useful for characterizing the computer functionality of different programs written in different languages for different environments. Moreover, language-neutral and environment-neutral descriptions of computer functionality can be used to enable co-operation of the different programs written in different languages, for different environments. Data structures are an important aspect of computer functionality. While primitive data structures (data types) are relatively easily mapped to respective primitive data structures of markup languages, nested data structures also need to be expressed in the markup language.
An example of a current markup language endorsed by the World-Wide Web consortium (W3C), is extensible markup language (XML). XML is further associated with a schema definition language (XSD) that provides for the definitions of schemata. A schema definition is used by XML message senders to transmit an instance of a data structure as a flat XML message using an XML tagged message format. The tagged message is used by XML message receivers to reconstruct the data structure from the tagged name-value pairs.
Canonical mappings exist between XML and java, visual basic and other languages currently used for developing web applications, including the mappings for data structures. However, legacy computer applications, written in Cobol, C or PL/I, for example, which have been developed for many years at great expense, have not been provided with mapping algorithms. The legacy applications are reliable, but, as the term “legacy” denotes, they are not adapted to be executed by current computing platforms. One particular type of a legacy computer system is a customer information control system (CICS). CICSs are online transaction processing programs for building customer transaction applications in mainframe computing environments. Much of CICS programming is written in the COBOL programming language. Consequently a great number of legacy applications still in use are written in COBOL. Similarly the C programming language has been very popular and has been used to create a lot of computer functionality that drives today's business operations.
What is therefore needed is an automated process for describing legacy data structures using a markup language. In particular, a method and apparatus for constructing schemata corresponding to the data structures created using legacy computer languages. A value latent in legacy computer applications, and an opportunity to part those application to various computing environment and programming language-agnostic services, underscores the need to provide the method for generating schema definitions required to define those services.